work. life. open source. diatribes.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at the fOSSa conference in beautiful but chilly Grenbole, France…

It was an interesting conference as it was mostly researchers and academia in attendance. For my presentation, I talked a bit about the evolution of version control in open source and why there’s no going back from a distributed version control system…

The benefits of a distributed version control system like Git are pretty clear:

Collaborate without a central authority

Disconnected operations so you can work offline

Easy branching and merging compared to existing approaches

Define your own workflow to meet the needs of your team

Powerful community sharing tools like GitHub

Easier path to contributor to committer

Some people in the audience also asked why Eclipse chose to move to Git over some other version control system… I think the main reasons were:

Git is the most popular DVCS and actively maintained (this was a particular problem with CVS)

EGit and JGit work together and are actively developed at Eclipse by a diverse set of committers (no repeat of having two SVN projects at Eclipse that didn’t want to work together)

Git is fast and scales well

Mature and popular community tools like GitHub and Gitorious

Anyways, thank you fOSSa organizers for a wonderful conference and hope to see you next year!